


Antimatter for the Master Plan

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Killjoys, Explosives, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-11
Updated: 2014-05-11
Packaged: 2018-01-24 09:28:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1599884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three boys, one bomb, and a hell of a lot of bullets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Antimatter for the Master Plan

**Author's Note:**

> This is for the lovely [Neon](http://alfonsfox.tumblr.com). It is [Killjoys](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egG7fiE89IU)-tastic. I am going to do my absolute damnedest not to let myself write more of this universe, _ever_. Proceed with caution. XD
> 
> Side note: I CAN'T BELIEVE THERE IS A KILLJOYS AU TAG(?!!!!).

_Eight legs to the wall_   
_Hit the gas, kill ’em all_   
_And we crawl_   
_And we crawl_   
_And we crawl_   
_You be my detonator_

– “Na Na Na” – My Chemical Romance –

 

Falling in love with Ed is like skydiving off of a very, very low and extremely scenic cliff.

…that honestly wasn’t meant to be a dig at Ed’s stature, but there’s no harm in multitasking, so Alfons will take that, too.

The thing is—you know from the start, when you’re still standing at the top a safe distance from the edge, that it’s the dumbest goddamn idea you’ve ever had in your life.  You know you’ll wind up sprawled in the sand with half your skeleton shattered if you’re _lucky_ , and it’s more likely that you’ll conclude your pitiful existence by splatter-painting some portion of the cliff face with your unfortunate remains.  You know you shouldn’t even try.  You know nothing good can come of it.  You know _better_ —better than to take the risk when there’s really nothing to gain.

But it’s going to be so _beautiful_ for that brief little moment while you’re in the air.  And life is short, and cheap, and _seriously_ shitty, and what’s so wrong with craving a shot of adrenaline spiked with oxytocin and a touch of mad testosterone?

It’s weird, too, how the grating surfaces of all of Ed’s obnoxious habits have sort of worn down to just a faintly chafing sort of contour; and how his brashness seems vivacious, and his enduring lack of volume control is almost charming.  All the old books used to say that love is transformative, but Alfons never really believed it—and even on optimistic days, he certainly didn’t understand how _much_.  It’s like there was a curtain hung between his eyes and Ed’s intentions, and with it swept away—everything he does is _different_.

In quiet moments, while his Icarus-Adonis is passed out on the mostly-shredded couch, and Al is playing chess against imaginary grandmasters, Alfons lights a cigarette and sketches out equations in a notebook, never labeling the variables just in case.  There has to be an explanation.  Maybe it’s a prismatic thing; when the light that a person casts hits love, it splits off into an infinite quantity of strips of component colors, and the spectrum just has so much more depth than the original beam represented…

Or maybe it’s a combustion engine thing, and when you fuel an attraction, you’re either gunning off into the sunset, or you’re about to die in a fiery wreck.

Alfons wouldn’t call himself a lucky guy.  Odds are he’s spectacularly fucked.

“Well,” Al says over the growl of the engine, with the usual deeply disturbing calmness.  “It’s a lovely day for unwarranted demolition.”

“Too fucking hot,” Ed says.  Also as usual, Alfons had assumed he was asleep; the way he slouches in the passenger seat with his sunglasses on makes it almost impossible to tell the difference.

“You’re a buzzkill,” Al says—a statement of fact, not an insult.

“You’re a fishwife,” Ed says.

“You’re both making it hotter in here by talking,” Alfons says.

“Shut up and drive,” Ed says, but he’s grinning, and that alone is enough to make Alfons’s stupid heart squeeze.

“Shut up and let me,” Alfons says, and grinning back isn’t a choice; it’s a compulsion.

“ _Eugh_ ,” Al says.

Eloquent, Alfons has to admit.

“Can it, punk,” Ed says cheerfully.  “So—same old song and dance?”

“Of course,” Alfons says.  “You both do it so well.”

“You’re quite the conductor,” Al says.

Ed pushes his sunglasses up into his hair, which should be hilariously unattractive—and which is quite the opposite.

“Word,” he says.

And there’s something—in his eye—but there’s always _something_ gleaming in the rings of gold there; this could be some permutation of its thousand predecessors.  This could be another variation on the flitting frames of fascination and amusement and misery and delight and scathing sarcasm and soaring rage that play across his face.

Or it could be something—new.

… _nah_.  It’s just that Ed’s a pyro.

Well, hell; Alfons is a pyro, too.

And with the rumbling engine vibrating straight through the soles of his boots and right into his blood, the worn leather of the wheel in his grip, the arid wind screaming past them in the red-orange tableau of the desert, and the best of friends beside and behind him—he’s unstoppable.

That’s the hope and the halfhearted prayer, anyway.

Alfons has been keeping his heart steady by force of will, but it starts to pound despite him as they fly past a road sign—the dust has almost worn the paint away, but you can still make out _military base_ in the scraps and angles that remain.

Every damned adventure could be their last.

It’s not even fair to think “adventure”, is it?  _Escapade_ , maybe.  _Completely inconsequential act of small-scale destruction and meaningless defiance_.

But it’s something, after all.  And it gives them a reason to keep going when there aren’t too many left.

He watches the odometer and makes a sharp right after half a mile.  There’s still a chance the guard towers at the gate will have seen a cloud of dust, but it could be anything—and on a day this bone-bleachingly, soul-drainingly hot, Alfons is willing to bet they won’t bother with more than a cursory onceover with binoculars.  He slows down regardless; the blooming trail of dust behind them settles low, and they crawl another mile or so, and then he can almost make out a shimmer of barbed wire dancing with the heat waves.

He parks it and pulls the brake, looks at Ed, and looks at Al.  “Are we good?”

“Hell, no,” Ed says, fighting his way out of the seatbelt—it stopped retracting well over a year ago when something jammed up the mechanism, but he always insists on calling shotgun anyway.  “Good is overrated.”

Speaking of shotguns, Al shifts partway off of the seat to sling his over his back.  “And subjective.”

“Good point,” Alfons says.

“Oh, _har_ ,” Ed says.

Alfons braces himself for the full blast of the heat, opens the door, and unfolds out of his seat—one of the few pitfalls of this indestructible car is that they didn’t really consider the comfort of tall people when they designed the thing, which _might_ explain part of Ed’s affection for it.  It feels like the very frigging _air_ is burning, and the last thing he wants to do is touch black metal, but he pops the trunk.  The fingerless gloves are great for protecting his hands from… well, a hell of a lot of things, including but not limited to small exothermic accidents and minor acid spills, while leaving his fingertips free and nimble for the delicate operations, but he almost scalds his fingerprints off every time he needs something out of the back.

First order of business: the utility suspenders.  Ed never, _ever_ fails to roll his eyes and mutter something about their incalculable lameness, but for one thing, having ammunition for every kind of gun he carries plus backup packets of all the chemicals he needs _plus_ two hand-grenades and six safety pins has saved Alfons’s sorry ass on several occasions… and for another, he doesn’t give a single fuck about the fashion policing of someone whose favorite belt buckle is a giant pewter skull hemorrhaging flames.

Second order of business: the kit.

He’s gotten pretty good at ignoring the way the grains of grit simultaneously jab at his knees and attempt to sear through the denim every time he sets the kit down on level ground to kneel over it and assess the state of the union.

It’s a good day, or a day on which the roads were gentle, which are pretty much the same thing—none of the vials and tubes managed to meet and break in spite of the cotton stuffed between them.  All they await is a tender, tending hand, and they’ll become something brighter and headier and hotter even than Ed’s sun-struck silhouette—and significantly larger.

“Do you need to pee, Ed?” Al asks.

“ _No_ ,” Ed says.  “Fuck you and your long-ass memory.”

“Ten years isn’t that long ago,” Al says.

“Shut _up_ ,” Ed says.

“Both of you shut up,” Alfons says, gathering the wire, buckling the lid of the box, and lifting the strap over his shoulder.  “And suit up.”

“Bossy,” Ed mutters as he gathers up his knives.

“Come on, Brother,” Al says.  He twirls his favorite Glock around his middle finger before he holsters it.  “The sooner we do this, the sooner we get out of this _heat_.”

“Meh,” Ed says.

“The sooner we do this,” Alfons says, “the sooner you get food.”

“ _Now_ we’re talkin’,” Ed says.

“Good,” Al says.  “Maybe we can muster the ambition to walk and talk at the same time.”

“And chew gum,” Alfons says, slamming the trunk—but not too hard; mechanics are a bit holy grail-ish these days.

“And kick ass,” Ed says.

And of course it’s the parched air and not the way Ed throws his bangs back that summons an immediate drought in Alfons’s throat.

  


* * *

  


Love softens the harsh lines of a lot of things to watercolor, but it ain’t got jack on mile-long walks through the desert in the daytime.  The faint honeycomb of the chain-link fence creeps towards them at a pace so petty Macbeth would pitch a fit.

When they reach it at long, long, _long_ last, before Alfons can even cough out something clever about doing the honors around the dust in his throat, Al is dropping his duffel bag to the ground, unzipping it, and withdrawing his trusty bolt cutters from the nest of tools within.  He snips out a neat half-archway from about the height of his shoulder down to the ground; Ed hands Alfons a navy blue bandanna and Al a black one and wraps his trademark red over his nose and mouth, tying it in the back just underneath his ponytail.  A scrap of a fallen turquoise comrade gets knotted to Al’s handiwork on the fence, and then all three of them put a shoulder into their makeshift gate to wedge it open wide.

The remainder of the walk is a lot quieter—against the urging of their nerves, they’ve learned the hard way to keep it swift.  But they’re lucky, today, or what passes for it.  The base’s main garage is the first thing Alfons _sees_ of the building; it’s labeled above the tin rolldown door in faded stenciled paint and verified by several tire tracks that the wind hasn’t taken yet.

Alfons’s heart is banging in his throat like it’s seeking its freedom.

“Door,” he says.

“See it,” Al says.

“Joy,” Ed says.

Alfons reaches it first and has his switchblade in hand before it comes into arm’s length; he flips the blade open, winches it into the dusty slot of the large screw that secures the casing on the keypad, twists the damn thing out, jimmies the blade into the gap, and pries the metal cover open.  The hinges reward him with a horrendous shrieking squeak as he drags it all the way open to expose the wires.

“Brother,” Al says, holding up a pair of needle-nose pliers that he’s Mary Poppinsed from the depths of the duffel bag.

“I was just gonna use my fingers,” Ed says, but he takes them before he leans in and starts sorting through the wires.

“You’re weird enough without any more mild electrocutions,” Al says.

“That’s libel,” Ed says.  “I expect better from you.  It’s _shocking_.”

“I’m gonna puke,” Al says.

“No, you’re not,” Ed says.  He plucks a wire, and the smudged display window waiting for their code goes blank.  “That’d be unprofessional.”  He straightens, hands the pliers back to Al, draws a breath, reaches out, and turns the door handle.

It opens smoothly and silently, and just from the crinkling of his eyes, Alfons can tell in spite of the bandanna that Ed is flashing the sunbeam grin.

“Ready?” he asks.

“Born ready,” Alfons says.

“I doubt that,” Al says.

“ _Can_ it,” Ed says, and slips into the hallway towards the alarm for the garage.

Alfons jacks this panel open, too, and while Ed’s working and Al’s digging in the duffel, he draws out one of his last four cigarettes.

“Those things are gonna kill you,” Ed says, like he always does, as the pack retreats back into a pocket.

“They help me concentrate,” Alfons says, like he always does, instead of _Edward, you beautiful soul—do you really think any of us are going to last that long?_

“You,” Ed says—and even without anyone looking up, somehow they all know this is directed at Al.  “Die and I’ll murder you, understand?”

“Likewise,” Al says calmly.

Ed’s eyes are smiling a little again, but there’s a strain in it—and then he’s tugging another wire free, and the alarm warning obediently changes its tune from _Armed_ to _Offline_.

Usually Ed’s off like a shot—or at least like a small blond bat out of hell—so it’s strange that he hesitates.

“Hey, Alfons,” he says.  There’s an off-note in his voice—uncertainty, maybe; it’s so foreign to his speech that it’s impossible to pinpoint.

Alfons fits the switchblade back into the designated strap on his suspenders and gets out his lighter instead.  “Yeah?”

Ed looks at him for a long, long moment—rationally speaking, it’s probably no more than a second and a half, but it feels like ages.

“Nothin’,” he says.

Then he turns on his heel and runs.

Al sighs.  “Sorry.”

Alfons pushes his bandanna halfway to the side, which probably looks _beyond_ absurd, and lights the cigarette.  His life has been absurd for a long time; this isn’t about to make it worse.  “What for?”

“My brother,” Al says.

Alfons grins around his softly-smoking prize.  “It’s all right.”

He’s not stupid, and he doesn’t need it spelled out, and sometimes it’s nice—having something sweet and nebulous and not-quite-spoken.  Something to bask under the sheer possibility of.  Something to believe in.

Al smiles faintly.  “To business, then?”

“Damn right,” Alfons says.

They slip back out of the hallway into the abominable heat and shift over to crouch by the rolldown door of the garage.  Alfons leans in as close as he can bear to the metal—it’s _radiating_ heat; his forehead prickles as a whole new thread of sweat beads on his hairline—to wait.  He’s counting down; Ed tends to take just about forty seconds to scope the place and give the signal—in the meantime, Al hands him a crowbar, and he eases the end under the bottom of the garage door.

Thirty-five.  Thirty-six.  Thirty-seven.

There’s a sharp three-rap knock on the other side.

They’ve got probably a grand total of five minutes.

Alfons levers hard on the crowbar, and the door shudders, squeals, and yields them just over three inches—plenty for Al to slip in a waiting jack and start cranking; when there’s a full foot and a half cleared, Alfons slides under, sending up a silent (and probably futile) blessing for the leather jacket standing valiantly between his shoulder-blades and the concrete.  When he’s in, he reaches through the gap to retrieve the kit.

He clambers to his feet with it and starts scanning the corners of the room for the cameras—and then he hears the alarms.

Sounds like Ed pulled a fire again this time—he does tend to favor those.  In another minute, he’ll be rousting out and rounding up any stragglers, and then it’ll be right about time to start throwing smoke bombs into the ordered lines at their emergency assembly point.

A part of Alfons wants to keep imagining it, but there’s no time for the terror that would drown him if he’d let himself feel even a fraction of its cold.

The garage is clear, as he knew it would be; Ed’s faster than the undulating twist of a dust devil in the rearview mirror, but he’s never careless—not with this.

Alfons sets the kit down in the center of the space, on a spot of smooth cement between a supply truck and an unarmored jeep, where he unbuckles the restraints and opens the lid.

“Trade you,” Al says, offering him the first of the fuse ends.

“Thanks,” Alfons says, which is not especially easy to do without spitting out a cigarette that he wouldn’t surrender for its weight in well-wrought gold.  He takes the tip of the fuse and passes Al a packet of specialty black powder for the other end.

Al unrolls the fuse on its spool, drawing it off towards the corner of the room, ducking under fuel lines and darting past reinforced bumpers.  Alfons’s hands can almost do this alone, but he’d better not risk it—not with everything that’s at stake; Ed would track down and torment his sooty ghost if he blew Al sky-high out of negligence.

The kit is a bit of a masterpiece, if he does say so himself—it’s the remarkably efficient lovechild of a Rube Goldberg machine and a timed mine, and it’s brought down a small city’s worth of buildings over the years.  It’s mostly been garages like this one, and storerooms, and armories—minimal casualties; they’re aiming for the wallet, not the heart.

He draws out all of the soaked, spent, soggy icepacks and hands off another mine to Al; slowly, slowly, and _so_ gently he pours the components into their respective compartments, and then hands Al another mine; cautiously he draws out the last few scraps of protective cotton and jams them in a pocket, and carefully, carefully, _carefully_ primes the fuse.

He sits back on his heels and takes a long drag off the cigarette as he looks it over, not that he couldn’t assemble one of these blindfolded with his hands tied.  He glances up at the cameras again—not that they’ll recognize him even if the footage does survive; not that it would matter if they did; the one advantage of having virtually nothing to your name is having virtually nothing left to lose.  So what if they somehow pry an ID out of the grainy video?  So what if they figure out who he used to be?  It won’t do a damn thing for them.  There’s no one to use as leverage and no records left to compromise; all of his habits have changed.  His life story as it’s written in the documentation and the evals and the wiretaps wouldn’t yield them anything useful at all.  The Alfons Heiderich who worked quietly on fighter jets at a state plant a half-hour’s smoggy commute from a sleepy suburb apartment, for all his test scores and parts patents, for all his farsighted planning and ‘maturity’, wouldn’t be able to comprehend the kid crouching over the elegant IED if he tried for _days_.

Alfons looks right at the camera, bandanna notwithstanding, and smiles.  They’ll see it in his eyes, if they’re looking.

Al comes back for the last mine—they’re pretty wonderful contraptions, too, all told; in and of themselves they could turn most of a tank to melted scrap.

Gingerly, Alfons withdraws the thin sheet of glass that separates the muriatic acid from the acetone peroxide, and everything starts to flow together.  It’s a chemical maelstrom now—a deliberate catastrophe waiting to happen; there’s a _thrill_ to that.  He leans over it and… listens.

“Done,” Al says from behind a battered camouflaged humvee.

Then the pounding of a pair of boots, running lightly but _oh_ -so fast.

“ _Go_!”  Ed’s voice echoes wildly from down the hall.  “ _They’re tailin’ me,_ go!”

The lighter’s in Alfons’s hand; the wheel’s under his thumb; the fuse is catching, and the flame flares blue—

Al yanks the zipper on the duffel bag shut and hefts it without breaking his stride; Alfons gives the spreading web of explosives one last look—and spots an unopened pack of cigarettes on the dashboard of the jeep nearest to the door.

Life is short, and shitty, and less-shitty with a twirl of silver smoke around your cheekbones and a shot of sweet, sweet nicotine beating in your blood.

He runs for the hall but skids to a stop to sling his hand in through the open window; his fingertips graze the corner of the package, and he thinks for a devastating out-breath that he’ll slip by—

But the worn leather long-since conformed to his sticky palm gives him the traction, and he snatches the pack and whips his arm back out of the jeep; he’s at Al’s heels and still counting down to impact.

A blur of black and red slings down the hall at the same second that they reach the doorway, and the commotion’s catching up; the shouts get louder even as he and Al swing around the doorway and scramble for the open air.

The light’s blinding, and the sun’s scalding, and the heat’s like a solid wall, but Ed doesn’t even slow down—the bright blond ponytail ripples behind him as he races for the fence, and Al’s stride doesn’t falter.  Alfons could collapse to the dust and sweat out his body weight; hardly a soul would blame him, but he _can’t_ fall behind—

_God_ , it’s too fucking _hot_ —

It’s like being steamrolled slowly; it’s like boiling from the inside; it’s like wading into the pits of hell, with all the sulfur vents and noxious steam that you’d expect.

Ed barrels through the hole cut through the fence; Al dips through it somehow gracefully, with the shotgun swinging and the duffel raised behind him; the sweat is streaming down Alfons’s spine, and his eyes are stinging with it, but he’s snagged his hair or his jacket on the chain link before, and he has to _slow_ enough to do it _properly_ when the only impulse in him is to _make this end_ —

The first bullet tears through the turquoise scrap they left the instant that he’s through.  Dust bursts on the pathway where it lands; the sky bears down on them, crystal-solid, heat straight through.

_Keep running._

_If you ever loved anything in your whole stupid life, kid,_ run _—_

His lungs are furnace bellows, and his skin’s aflame, and the bullets are coming closer, but that’s not even what they’re really running from.

“ _How long_?” Ed screams back at him.

Alfons doesn’t have a single breath cold enough to craft into an answer, but—poetically on-cue—the shock wave slams into them, and then the _sound_ —

Alfons’s head rattles back to rights, and he blinks at a sideways horizon made of dust; an extremely bewildered scorpion skitters away.  He levers himself up to his knees first, then staggers to his feet.

The compound sends billowing towers of orange flame and ashen smoke into the stark blue sky.

“Up!” Ed’s shouting.  “Up, up, up, come on!”

Even as Alfons steps forward to reach for Al’s other arm to haul the poor kid upright, his own hands automatically start to check all the holsters strapped to his body to make sure they haven’t lost their cargo.  Al’s got the precious duffel in a vise grip in one hand, with the other clinging to Ed, so Alfons grabs a fistful of the back of his jacket and pulls.

“ _Ow_!” Al says.

“Be glad it wasn’t your hair,” Alfons says.

“ _Shut the fuck up_!” Ed says, and they’re off again, and under the distant roar of the flames and the smaller bursts of individual vehicles succumbing to the inferno, there’s a rumble that Alfons doesn’t like.

He chances a glance backwards.

There must have been a second garage.

“Incoming,” he strangles out around the miserably hot breath scraping up and down his throat; he can _see_ the car gleaming in the harsh sun like a shard of obsidian ahead of them, and he fumbles the keys into his right hand; somehow the cigarettes wound up in his left—

“ _Motherfucker_!” Ed is howling, which Alfons can’t help thinking is a _touch_ unnecessary, as the desperate adrenaline sends them sailing towards the car.  Also entirely unneeded is the way Ed hurls himself at the hood, leaps, and slides across it on his ass to get around the passenger side—but that’s so weirdly sexy that Alfons kind of can’t complain.

Alfons’s momentum sends him crashing into the car door; he’s _sure_ he burns his forearm on the metal, but there isn’t time; he doesn’t tend to lock an obsolete vehicle when he parks it in the godforsaken desert, so it’s just a matter of flinging the door open, tossing himself down, and finding the ignition—

“Buckle up,” he says.

“Ha,” Ed says, and slots a new clip into his Beretta.

Alfons would say something snappy, but he’s gunning the engine and slamming his foot down on the accelerator.

The tires grind, the engine growls, and red dust spurts behind them, flooding the air around the car as Alfons drags the wheel as far to the right as it’ll go—

Four seconds and one-hundred-and-seventy-eight degrees later, the squeal of rubber on grit is deafening; Ed’s teeth are clenched, and he’s clinging to the door, and the sun is directly in Alfons’s eyes as he jerks the gearshift out of first and jams his foot down on the pedal, and the force blasts them all back against their seats—

Just two miles to the highway.  Just two miles of barren desert wasteland broken only by the four machine-gun-crowned humvees growing bigger by the second in the left-hand mirror—

“Gosh,” Al says.

“Son of a _bitch_ ,” Ed says.

“Hang on,” Alfons says, and he doesn’t wait to see if they’re listening before he shifts to third-fourth-fifth and _floors it_ —

Red dust and oil-black smoke surge skyward in their wake; for a second, then two, he can’t even see their pursuers—then he can; they scud across the cracked waste so fast they look like they’re skimming _over_ the ground, not laboring across it like his poor faithful car.

“All right,” Al says calmly, lifting the goggles around his neck and settling them over his eyes.  “Drive smoothly, if you’d be so kind.”

“No promises,” Alfons says, glancing desperately between the rocky barrenness ahead and the trucks blazing behind.  The wheel shakes in his grip, doing its damnedest to wrench his wrist back and forth as the dirt racks the undercarriage and the riddled land fights to twist the tires.

Al sighs feelingly, and then the rearview’s blocked completely as he climbs up to plant one foot on the bench seat and one on the center console, priming him to pry the ancient sunroof open.  He clambers up and out and—Alfons doesn’t have to see to know—slings the shotgun around and fits it to his shoulder.

“Damn it,” Ed says, leaning in, maybe closer than is strictly necessary, and looking at the speedometer.  “Where the hell did they get steroids for _Hummers_?”

The sweat sticking to Alfons’s spine, beading at the nape of his neck, and slipping along the lines on his palms is starting to go cold—Ed wasn’t fooling; the hulking SUVs behind them are getting larger by the second in the side mirror; he can almost see the gunners’ eyes—

Al’s slender frame rattles from the recoil, and one of the trucks’ tires blows.

“Nice, Al!” Ed says.  “Hang in there!”

If there’s any response, it’s lost to the dust and the wind.

Ed takes a deep breath, unleashes a melodramatic sigh to rival his brother’s from a few moments ago, lays his hand on Alfons’s shoulder, and squeezes.  Then he shoves his sunglasses back on, rolls the window down, sticks his head out, and levels his Beretta.

Alfons can’t tell if he’s shouting unprintable things yet—and wondering about it will have to wait.  The only thing between the ratty, dust-encrusted mat on the floor and the sole of his boot is the accelerator, and the whole frame of the car is jittering so hard his teeth feel like they’re jumping in his skull.

But he can _just_ make out the mountains in the distance, which means that wavering strip of silver in front of them _has_ to be the road—

Another of the trucks behind them swerves to the left, sparks scattering from one of its mangled wheels; shreds of rubber fly, and it slows until it’s swallowed by the dust. 

Al drops to the backseat like a bag of rocks and flattens himself on the torn cushions _instants_ before a hail of bullets rains on the roof, the window, the _trunk full of explosives_ —

On second thought, that might not’ve been the _best_ plan Alfons has ever had.

Ed’s got his hands and arms back inside the vehicle now, the better to grab a fistful of Alfons’s hair, scream “ _Down_!”, and unceremoniously attempt to fold them both in half.

It’s all Alfons can do to try to keep the wheel more or less steady—they veer rightward, and he tries to correct, but all he can see is the gearshift and the torn denim around Ed’s scraped and bloodied knee—

“Assholes,” Ed says, and his grasp vanishes as quickly and viciously as it came, and he’s back out the window with the bandanna whipping; Alfons hauls himself up and spins the wheel _just_ in time to swing them around the mile marker instead of blasting them straight into it.

It’s his turn to reach across the cab, seize the back of Ed’s collar, and drag the dumbshit back in before the massive, jarring bump back onto the pavement takes Ed’s head off or—worse—knocks his precious Beretta out of his hands.

The car’s never going to forgive him for this—

His own _skeleton_ is never going to forgive him for this—

The tires raise a banshee shriek as he heaves on the wheel and slings them into another gut-upending ninety-degree turn the _moment_ they clear the shoulder of the road, and for a too-fucking- _long_ second, he thinks they’re going to skid right off the other _side_ —

And then—

There’s steaming-hot tarmac under the tires, and the rubber grips it like an old lover, and the engine gives a tiger’s purr, and they’re _off_ —

The humvees waste a few more rounds, but nobody can beat Alfons Heiderich’s baby on the open road; _nobody_ can catch him once he’s got a stretch of highway sprawled out ahead of him towards the horizon.

“Shit,” Ed says, and then he’s collapsing across the center console, and the heat of his breath _should_ be uncomfortable as he starts to laugh.  “ _Shit_.  Everybody alive?”

“Seems like it,” Al says.  “You might have asked that _before_ you went into hysterics.”

“Might’ve,” Ed says.  “Didn’t.”

Alfons chances to look down.  “I… need a cigarette.”

Ed summons the unopened pack out of nowhere like a stage magician and waves it.  “ _Yo_.  Eyes on the road; I got you.”

He tears through the plastic, taps one out, and takes Alfons’s chin in one hand to set the cigarette in the corner of his mouth with the other—incredibly, _overwhelmingly_ focused, like it’s the single most important task of his life.  His eyes are deeper than the desert and warmer than the flames they left to rage towards the sky, and Alfons barely even sees the end of his cigarette catch and start to smolder.

“How’s that?” Ed says, tossing the spare lighter back into the glove.

“Perfect,” Alfons says.

“ _Gross_ ,” Al says.

  


* * *

  


Their hole in the wall isn’t much to speak of, but it’s _theirs_ , and it’s safe so far.  For bonus points, it’s mostly subterranean, so it neither stands out nor gets quite as murderously sweltering as a regular safehouse might.

“Jesus fuck,” Ed says, stretching both arms high over his head until his back cracks once they’ve parked their battered chariot in the adobe block that comprises the only part of their sanctuary aboveground.  “What a day.”

“You should put some peroxide on that,” Alfons says, gesturing—with his elbow; his arms don’t seem to want to lift themselves enough for pointing—to Ed’s knee.

Al shoulders his shotgun and turns the innocent gaze on Alfons.  “But do you think we’ve got enough?”

“Food first,” Ed says.  “Disinfectants that double as explosives later.”

  


* * *

  


And when the night’s well and truly fallen, and the desert’s gone so bleak and cold that no one would recognize it if they’d only seen it in the light, Alfons thinks that this is what it means to be alive.

Just this—adrenaline highs so fierce the whole world’s spinning on a pinpoint; waves of relief so thick and giddy that you almost _want_ to drown.  Cobbling celebratory dinners together out of cans of who-knows-what with two smartasses that make the desert look obscenely dull and, sometimes, rather kind.

This is enough.

This is what he _wants_ to die for.

  


* * *

  


Eventually, the madness of the whole thing fades into a sort of distant throb of disbelief, and, alone in his room at last, Alfons sets the creased-to-tearing star charts aside and turns out the light.

He hasn’t even settled before the door opens a crack.

“Hi,” Ed says.

So much for sleep; Alfons’s heart is pounding; his pulse is rushing in his ears.  “Hi.”

Just a pair of boxers and a tank top leave very little to imagine.  The whole thing is remarkable, really; Alfons has done the laundry, so he _knows_ they hold no magic when they’re not on Ed.

Ed, wonder of wonders, marvel of marvels, little shit of little shits, has kicked the door shut and is climbing casually into the other side of the bed.

Alfons pauses to determine two things: that he cannot move; and that he’s somehow breathing.

Ed tucks an arm under the extra pillow, kicks his feet around a little, tugs on the sheet, and clears his throat.

“Hey, Alfons,” he says.

Alfons has to fight his throat to let him speak the syllable.  “Yeah?”

Ed shifts in closer, and then closer still, and touches just his fingertips to Alfons’s back.

“Nothin’,” he says.

Alfons rolls over just far enough to meet his eyes and smile.  “You want to make it something?”

Ed’s grin could fell nations, let alone a boy.


End file.
